'Hey -!' as the screens cleared.
Hung out in the interminable void before them was a spherical asteroid perhaps two miles in diameter at its equator. A pretty, self-willed rock, speedwell blue and flecked with gold, it was orbiting no detectable primary body. The rest of the Galaxy seemed oddly remote, as if this fragment of jetsam had attained some absolute topological direction and was describing an intricate, metaphysical course from which everything else in the universe was equally distant. Hung out there alone, then, like a semiprecious moon, implausible.
'We are between the stars here, weaving along the gravity interface of Sol and Centauri,' said Himation. 'Pater found this place. He first named it "Howell," because it's a rogue — ' He laughed at their bewilderment, and refused to explain the joke. 'Lately though he's begun to call it "Versailles". '
He pointed at the forward screen, black shrouded arm, white finger. 'Look! Watch the golden areas — '
Two bright flecks drifted out of the blue eye, expanded dizzily, and quite suddenly became two ships — two facing golden cruisers fully a quarter of a mile long, with lean flanks, raked and curved fins and curious dorsal bulges. White, gemlike flames burned at their sterns; turquoise enamelwork made flowing ideographs over their hulls, a language of delicious, tangled flower stems. They were like nothing Truck had ever seen. They bracketed Ella Speed; he shivered at the enticing curvature of their bellies; they were spires from a forgotten planet, they were awesome and perplexing.
'Fastidious and La Vie de Boheme' announced Himation proudly. 'Two among forty-nine. But never as dangerous as my own; she's the Atalanta in Calydon,
"The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies."
She's over the horizon from here. But they'll do to shepherd us down.'
Good humor spilled over into his hands again. They discovered a tiny live lizard behind Fix the bos'n's ear. It sat in the cup of his palms, distending its scarlet throat, and blinked studiously up at him.
'I wouldn't have believed it,' declared Fix, 'if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.'
Later, after Himation had nudged My Ella Speed into a pit in the cyanic rock and grounded her gently, he refused to leave the ship. 'I got work to do, boss,' he insisted. 'She's coming out of the Dyne like a pregnant duck. I can't have that, not if we're going back to hauling cargo when all this' — he nodded pointedly at the anarchist — 'is done with. I suppose they'll have tool shops for those fairy great ships out there.' He stood stubbornly by the command panels, daring with folded arms Himation, General Gaw, UASR, politics, and prisons. 'We got to have maintenance.'
'Never argue with your bos'n, Captain,' advised Himation, and with flourishes made Fix a present of the lizard.
'I'm sure I don't know what to do with it,' grumbled the Chromian, but you could see he was pleased.
The asteroid was hollow.
Himation let Truck and Tiny through an outer shell, a primum mobile, of workshops, where pandemonium reigned among powerful lifting rigs and ships components to which Truck could put no name; where masked relatives of the wreckers at Carter's Snort waved their plasma torches like hayforks and seemed to take altogether as much pleasure in putting things together as their cousins did in taking them apart. After this demonic leaping and cutting and commotion of shadows, they passed through a sphere of armories — deserted and still, racked with dyne-torpedoes and the barrels of reaction cannon like organ pipes in the chill of an ancient church. 'Pater comes here often. Aren't they fine?' And finally a living area, where the air was heavy with an enigma of luxury: passages tapestried with hunting scenes by long dead artists from Oudry to Desportes, full of strangely clothed anarchists who nodded to Himation or halted their errands to attend to cheval glasses of crystal and adjust an item of dress.
They glimpsed through half-open doors a room whose tall, latticed windows seemed to look out over a pale lake among oaks where the great wet leaves of hemlock hung melancholic and inviting; another with a huge mantel on which ticked a clock shaped like a gilded elephant; a third empty but for one fauteuil — a woman wearing a white dress oddly spotted with crimson reclined there, slowly passing the rings on the fingers of her left hand to those of her right as she listened with immobile expression to the voice of a man they could not see. Himation smiled. 'A hologram,' he said. 'The Hotel Pimodan, 1849. Maryx, who inspired the Mignon of Ary Scheffer. She is listening to Baudelaire. They are waiting for Gautier and the snake-woman and the rest of the salon' He entered the room and pressed his hand through the languorous, mask-like face. 'See? Isn't it beautiful?'
'Are you a history professor or something?' asked Tiny politely. Truck sniggered, impressed against his will.
But Himation only shrugged laconically and, further on, rapped lightly twice at an elegant double door. The room he ushered them into was a spacious airy studio, lighted as if by a northlight as precious and passing as the Art it imitated. On a dais at the end of the chamber were easel and canvas; at the other sat a little sallow-faced girl with grave eyes and tiny breasts. Her clothes hung over a lacquered screen, and beside her was a basket of crochet work and a volume of poems; and, as she worked, she thoughtfully sang a song about artists and the way they loved:
Her eyes rested briefly on the intruders, calm, uninvolved. Around her on the eggshell-tinted walls hung Hokusai prints of uncanny refinement, arranged with harmonious aloofness; ethereal porcelain ginger jars adorned with the flowers of prunus and hawthorn rested on their shelves in rapturously exact alignment; there were silken fans decorated with dim balletic shapes. It was a fabrication of Art in itself, exquisite, ephemeral.
But it was not the room, despite its dreamy invitation; nor was it the girl. It was the man before the easel, with his tube of white lead and hog-hair bristle.
He was small and dapper, with tidy brown hands. He wore a white linen suit, a green carnation in the buttonhole of the left lapel. His eyes were dark and sharp, yet bubbling — as if a constant rediscovery of their use were being made behind them. His hair was black and curly, with a strange white streak. His palette was a nocturne of grays and midnight blue. He addressed the canvas with deft, quick motions, but somehow contrived to suggest by them an air of eloquent idleness. He was a thief and a rebel, he was a man of discrimination, he was ageless. He was Swinburne Sinclair-Pater, aesthete extraordinary and Interstellar Anarchist; and he prowled the Galaxy like a brilliant tiger, stalked the self-respect of IWG and UASR; and — snap! Bright teeth.
'Ah, le petit Manteau, au chapeau bizarre!' he cried, waving at Himation. 'Come in, dear boy! (Heloise, we are finished for today. Come tomorrow at the same time.) Captain Truck' — he dropped his brush and sprang down from the dais, extending his hand — 'how wistful of you to come in fancy dress!' Truck looked down at himself resentfully. 'Do you like my studio? The porcelain is K'ang, wonderful in its brittleness, hm? (Come, Heloise: out! Out!)' And he gestured extravagantly toward the door. The girl thinned her lips at him, shrugged, indolently put down her crochet hook and took up her clothes.